When reached at home by Business Insider on Monday afternoon,
Hersh addressed some of the criticisms of his reporting, which
have centered around his reliance on anonymous sources and an
apparent lack of documentary evidence for his claims.

In the story, Hersh alleges the US government's narrative of the
death of bin Laden was in fact an elaborate cover story meant to
conceal Pakistan's relationship with the Al Qaeda leader and to
yield maximum political payoff for President Obama in the runup
to the 2012 election season.

Hersh defended his reporting methods. When asked about his
decision to base some of his reporting on two unnamed consultants
with US Special Operations Command, Hersh said he was being held
to an unfair standard over his use of these kinds of anonymous
sources.

"It's really an attack-the-messenger," Hersh said. "Every day in
the newspaper, how many anonymous-sourced stories do you read?
Dozens of them."

In Hersh's view "that doesn't diminish the credibility" of a
journalist or a source: "That's just the way it is."

He also strongly defended his leading named source, Asad Durrani,
the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Agency in the
1990s. In the opening paragraphs of Hersh's piece, Durrani
corroborates Hersh's account of bin Laden's death.

The article suggests Durrani would have had knowledge of the
article's assertions relating to Pakistan's relationship with the
Al Qaeda leader. According to Hersh's reporting, ISI nabbed bin Laden in 2006 and held him
captive to use him as leverage against Taliban and Al Qaeda
activities in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"I consider him to be a
credible source because he was a former director of the ISI who
asked a lot of questions and knew a lot about what was happening
on the inside," Hersh told Business Insider.

Hersh cited Durrani's deep
involvement in Pakistan's nuclear weapons program and said that
he is still active in diplomacy with India. "I've known him for
years. He was involved in some very sensitive stuff."

"He's a grownup," Hersh says. "I've known him a long
time."

In Hersh's view, Durrani is also a man of conscience,
someone willing to risk his own safety to expose his government's
activities. "He's got to stay in Pakistan, he's got to stay with
his buddies," Hersh says. "But he had the courage to say, this is
what it is."

Aformer ISI director is a promising and
potentially hazardous source for a story like Hersh's.

While Durrani was in a position
of power, he was also embedded within a deeply opaque
intelligence agency with ties to jihadist groups and a
difficult-to-place role in Pakistani domestic politics. As Thomas
Joscelyn, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies told Business Insider, "there are multiple parts to the Pakistani
intelligence services. It's a wheels-within-wheels type of
situation. Parts of it
have cooperated with the US and parts of it haven't."

Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown University and a
leading authority on Pakistan's security and intelligence
apparatus, gave a blunt assessment of Durrani's credibility:
"Durrani has been delusional for years now and so far out of the
loop that to cite him is as a pivotal source is reckless
enthusiasm," Fair told Business Insider by email.

Asked about the White House's
firm rebuke of his reporting, Hersh said that he
expected the
pushback."The White
House is a political institution," Hersh said. "Of course they
want to manipulate the press. That's just normal."

Hersh says the presidency has been out to distort public
narratives of major events for as long as he's been an
investigative reporter.

"The White House doesn't like adverse stories that are contrary
to what they want the public to believe," Hersh says. "It's
always going to be that way. I don't think there's anything
remarkably different now" compared to the Vietnam era.

Hersh may be correct that there
is nothing inherently wrong with anonymous sourcing. And the
White House certainly promulgates its own version of major global
events, with the help of a classification system that gives it an
immeasurable advantage in molding public narratives about
national-security issues.

The issue is whether criticism of this specific piece is itself
tied to any active US government effort to twist the truth of the
bin Laden death, or whether criticism of anonymous sourcing and
other reporting methods is in fact appropriate in the case of
this specific story.

Hersh expressed frustration
with journalists who have focused on the story as a "media" story
while ignoring its alarming conclusions about the supposed
conduct of the Obama administration.

An aerial view shows the
compound that Osama bin Laden was killed in, in Abbottabad,
Pakistan.Department of
Defense

At the outset of the
conversation, Hersh asked why Business Insider was even
interested in talking to him and wondered, with teasing irony, if
we planned on asking whether the story is true. It was the kind
of question he has heard a wearying number of times over the
course of a storied career. The veracity of his own reporting was
a topic that seemed only to exasperate him.

"You're talking about someone who was a freelance reporter in
1969 and wrote about massacring hundreds of people in Vietnam for
an anti-war news agency," Hersh said. "My God, you don't think I
had trouble then?"

He's irritated at what he sees
as a public obsession with where and how his bin Laden report had
been published. "It's not a press story — it's a story about what
the government does," Hersh said. "If the questions are about the
press, I can't help you."